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Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb | 2014 | PG | - 2.5.3

NYC Museum's night watchman (Ben Stiller) sees that the energy level of his living exhibits is waning and causing short-circuited disasters. Then he discovers the museum's Egyptian magic energy tablet is corroding and he takes his son (Skylar Gisondo), a monkey, a Pharaoh (Rami Malek) and Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) to London's British Museum to find a way to recharge the tablet. Also with Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, Ricky Gervais, Dan Stevens, Mizuo Peck, Ben Kingsley, Rebel Wilson, Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Matt Frewer, Andrea Martin and Crystal the Monkey. Directed by Shawn Levy. [1:36]

SEX/NUDITY 2 - A woman and a Neanderthal man kiss briefly twice. A woman jumps into a Neanderthal man's arms, he catches her and she says that she will stay with him forever. A Native American woman walks arm-in-arm with a white man several times; he says that their friendship works, despite their differences. A monkey kisses a man on the lips and he returns the kiss.
 A Pharaoh tells a man, "Kiss my staff" and holds out his official staff. An older man dances and shimmies to music at a senior citizen's party and we hear that he is the sexiest guard a NYC museum ever had.
 In a play an actor sings part of a love song to a woman; a non-cast member jumps on stage and declares his love for the woman and when he finds she is not who he presumed she was, he becomes angry (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details).
 A pharaoh's wife wears a low-cut gown that reveals some cleavage. Roman soldiers wear knee-length skirts that reveal lower legs. A man's clothing features a cutout area that reveals his abdomen. In a statuary hall, we see several female sculptures (breasts and indistinct nipples are evident). We see a nude male sculpture with bare back, chest, abdomen and thighs visible. A centaur's human portion is a male which is seen bare from the neck to the waist, front and back.

VIOLENCE/GORE 5 - A black stone hydra-like being awakens and attacks humans, snapping several jaws at them; two men and a teen boy fight with swords, a dagger and a flashlight as other people run and one man eventually grabs a defibrillator and jumps on top of the largest snake head, shocking it with buzzing and sparks; all the heads and necks fall to the floor. A T-Rex skeleton comes to life in a museum, walks around and thrashes its tail near people and objects in a few scenes (no one is harmed, but people jump over the tail several times). A T-Rex skeleton dances with a Triceratops skeleton at a museum party. A Triceratops skeleton roars at people, bites a long animal horn in half, smashes glass out of a display case and attacks a knight, who slashes at it with a sword and finally punches it between the eye sockets; it lowers its tail between its legs and whines as it walks out of the room. During a museum banquet, the museum's alive-at-night exhibits go haywire: A US President figure jumps onto a banquet table, smashes some plates to the floor and points a rifle at a man (he does not shoot) while taxidermied animals come alive and run in circles, roaring and squawking and a tiger walks through the hall and people run, screaming; a man slaps a curious Neanderthal's hand away from his face, a man chops an ice sculpture to pieces with an axe, a small monkey points a shish kabob at a woman like a spear, a woman slaps a man in the face, a zebra rears in close-up and several men and women fall over a rope stretched ankle-high across a hallway.
 A knight in armor holds a knife to a teen boy's throat and steals a magic tablet from a man before riding away on a horse; the knight accosts a man and a woman portraying a scene from "Camelot," becomes angry and uses his sword to cut a stage tree in half as he shouts (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details); six people run onstage and chase the knight away, running onto a rooftop, where several characters pass out from lack of magic energy and look cracked and dead (a man becomes cross-eyed and a small monkey lies down and closes its eyes looking dead); all the dead-looking characters come back to life and we see that the knight has suffered a melted nose, which he twists back onto his face. We see a three-way duel inside M.C. Escher's lithograph containing staircases that connect oddly ("Relativity"); a knight and two men jump inside the print and look cartoonish, slashing at each other with swords and a flashlight and one man falls off a staircase, catches another man's hand, let's go and falls in a circle down and up again, and then down again to fall on top of the knight to escape; all three men tumble out of the print and run away.
 In Egypt a windstorm sends gales of sand flying and local workers become frightened while British bosses argue and order antiquities to be loaded into trucks quickly; a boy falls through the sand into a burial chamber and a local man babbles agitatedly in an unknown language before another man grabs the boy and declares grimly, "The End will come."
 A woman hits a large Mongol in the face with her hand, to no effect. A man hits another man in the face, with an open hand, to no effect. A caveman snorts and roars at a man. A caveman uses a defibrillator on his own chest and then his temples, shaking with the buzzing shocks that we hear. A caveman sticks a metal knife into the door of a lunchroom microwave when it is running and receives a buzzing and flashing shock (he is OK); he head-butts the narrow window in a locked door, smashing the glass to bits, escaping from the room with a male friend. A woman threatens a Neanderthal man with a hammer, but does not hit him.
 Two miniature men fall down heating shafts and jump down another shaft, landing on a furnace filter and gulping lint that they spit out when they slide off the filter to the floor, unharmed. Two miniature men find a diorama of Rome and a statue head mutters to them that it is Pompeii and lava is approaching as a volcano erupts in the background, sending sparks and lava flowing toward the men. Two small male figures in a wall fresco punch each other slowly (we hear "clink, clink"). In a statuary hall, several marble male and female sculptures, some headless or missing an arm or two, lurch on stumbling feet or pull themselves across the floor, as if they are war wounded, but are not (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details). Down a long hallway, stone frescoes of small men and small horses begin to move. Stuffed animal heads on a hallway wall turn side to side and a warthog head shivers in fear of a Triceratops skeleton nearby.
 An older man's hands turn to wax as he loses magic energy, his elbows lock and eventually, his knees lock, sending him falling backwards against a tilting skylight on a rooftop (he has no further damaged).
 An elderly man sits in a wheelchair and insults another man, calling him Short Stack and Monkey Face. A woman describes American security guards as all having two large handguns with silencers and a pair of ninja swords.
 A monkey standing above two miniature men in a museum urinates on them and we see a long stream of urine as the men grimace. A monkey stands on a table, looking like King Kong, and urinates to extinguish the flames from lava spewing in a volcano display (a stream of urine is visible); it drenches two miniature men and the floor, then urinates a second time on the men as they grimace and one man complains that the second urination was unneeded. A Neanderthal man eats Styrofoam packing peanuts twice.

LANGUAGE 3 - 9 mild obscenities, half-a-dozen "pffffft" derisive mouth noises, name-calling (dumb-dumb, disgusting, crazy, feeble, fool, stupid, coward, weird, short stack, monkey face, haunted hootenanny, Dangly Bells, revolting ape man, sad lump of wax), stereotypical references to men, women, fathers, teen boys, New Yorkers, Jews, Neanderthals, Asians, Americans, kings, knights, museum directors, archeologists, and security guards, 5 religious exclamations (e.g. Oh God, Egyptian Gods Are The Only True Gods, We're Just As God Made Us, What The Devil!).

SUBSTANCE USE - A magic energy tablet corrodes to green causing several characters to swoon from lack of energy that it gives them (the characters revive later). Large banquet tables are shown with many glasses of wine on them, a man and a woman pick up glasses of (they do not drink), and a teen boy has a loud party at 3:00 am and we see young men and young women holding red cups that indicate liquor (no one drinks).

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Magic, memories, learning, appreciating history, independence, sacrifice, helping others, families, friends, parenting, letting go, risk-taking, making realistic plans.

MESSAGE - Life can be full of adventure and magic.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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